Bhubaneswar, May 26: Fibre boxes placed at strategic locations in the city by the Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation four years ago to collect grievances and suggestions from the public have either disappeared or been damaged. The ones that have survived are not serving any purpose.
The civic body had planned to install 100 complaint collection boxes across the city in November 2009. However, after putting just 15 boxes in place a month later, the exercise was stopped.
Of the 15, only two boxes can be located now — one near the accountant-general’s office and the other near Rasulgarh square. The former, which is placed near the entrance of Jayadev Bhavan, is in good shape, it is no longer in use. The Rasulgarh Square box has been damaged. Sources said the others were removed during the widening of roads.
Sources said the 15 grievance and suggestion boxes were placed at AG Square, Rasulgarh Square, CRP square, Rupali square, Khandagiri Square, Yatri Nivas, Forest Park, Airport Square, Jayadev Vihar, VSS Nagar, Kalinga Hospital, Lingaraj temple, Power House Square, Gandamunda and Damana Square in December 2009.
Surprisingly, several officials of the civic body are not even aware that such a plan had been conceived. At present, the civic body is receiving complaints and grievances online through its website. The complaints are being forwarded to the officials concerned.
“The online receipt of grievances is good but many people, especially senior citizens and those not used to computers, are comfortable with the manual system of grievance redress system, of which the boxes were a part. The boxes placed at strategic locations were serving such people well, but it did not last because of the lack of support,” said Bijay Kumar Mishra, a resident of Saheed Nagar.
Ganesh Parida, a senior citizen of Pokhariput, said: “The civic authorities had a plan of placing more grievance boxes but I don’t know why it was not done.”
Deputy municipal commissioner Krushna Prasad Pati admitted that he was not aware that boxes had been placed at several points in the city for receiving grievances. “Many programmes and projects are implemented by senior officials in every organisation. But not all of them are followed up. I will definitely look into what went wrong with that grievance-redress mechanism,’’ he said.
